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Tag: Tea Party

A $600,000 federal grant is chump change compared to overall government spending, and I recognize that picking on individual awards generally isn’t worth the effort because there are bigger fish to fry. But every once in a while I think it’s alright to highlight a particularly ridiculous grant award for the purpose of illustrating that the federal government’s ability to spend money on virtually anything it wants has broader negative implications. So when I read this morning that the Institute of Museum and Library Services (an independent federal agency) gave UC Santa Cruz’s library $615,175 to archive Grateful Dead memorabilia online, I just couldn’t help myself.

The title of my post refers to a lyric from the Dead song “Uncle John’s Band.” According to the lyrics, Uncle John’s Band’s motto is “don’t tread on me.” “Don’t tread on me” was a motto of the American patriots during the Revolutionary War and was prominently featured below a coiled rattlesnake on the famous Gadsden flag.

The Gadsden flag, which I proudly own and used to hang in my Senate office, has regained popularity and can now be seen at TEA Party protests around the country. While some would like to dismiss the TEA partiers as racists, the resurgence of the Gadsden flag indicates to me that a healthy number of folks simply recognize the American tradition of being leery of an all-powerful centralized authority. It’s safe to say that those patriots of yesterday could have never imagined that the small, limited federal government they created would turn into the overbearing $3.7 trillion Leviathan it is today. What a long, strange trip it’s been indeed.

That’s my favorite placard from the Washington tea party protests on Saturday. No Child Left a Dime underlines perhaps the central concern of the protesters – the ongoing massive fiscal irresponsibility in Washington by both parties.

We’ve got deficits of more more than $1 trillion for years to come. Federal debt will approach World War Two levels within a decade. Even so, the Democrats are trying to ram through a $1 trillion health care expansion, and the head of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, is defending against any cuts to Medicare, the program that is the single biggest threat to taxpayers. People are marching not just because Obama and the Democrats are scaring their pants off, but because most Republicans in positions of power are spendthrifts as well.

The chart illustrates that no child will be left a dime because the government will have it all. This is the CBO’s “alternative fiscal scenario,” which essentially means the business-as-usual scenario if Congress doesn’t cut anything in coming years.

Note that the most rapidly growing box, the white box, is the program that Michael Steele doesn’t want to touch. The program is expected to grow by 6.3 percent of GDP by 2050. In today’s money, 6.3 percent of GDP is about $900 billion a year in added spending. So it’s like Steele doesn’t see anything wrong with tomorrow’s young families forking over an additional $900 billion a year in taxes on this one program, or about $7,700 a year for every American household.

It’s worse than that. The biggest box on the chart by 2050 is interest on the government debt, and by far the biggest contributor to the growth in interest is Medicare. So including interest, Michael Steele’s (ridiculous) Medicare position is sort of like supporting a more than $10,000 tax hike on every young family for this one program.

(By the way, interest costs rise in coming years because of an excess of spending, not a shortage of revenues. Under this CBO scenario, all current tax cuts are extended, and yet federal revenues still rise as a share of GDP over time above the historical norm of recent decades).

On the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and D.C., things are going much better than most of us dared hope in the initial aftermath of that horrible day. We’re still a secure, prosperous, and relatively free country, and the fear-poisoned atmosphere that governed American politics for years after 9/11 has thankfully receded.

Not everyone’s thankful, however. Boisterous cable gabber Glenn Beck laments the return to normalcy. The website for Beck’s “9/12 Project” waxes nostalgic for the day after the worst terrorist attack in American history, a time when “We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.” Beck’s purpose with the Project? “We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again.”

My God, why in the world would anyone want that? Yes, 9/12 brought moving displays of patriotism and a comforting sense of national unity, but that hardly made up for the fear, rage and sorrow that dominated the national mood and at times clouded our vision.

But Beck’s not alone in seeing a bright side to national tragedy. Less than a month after people jumped from the World Trade Center’s north tower to avoid burning to death, David Brooks asked, “Does anybody but me feel upbeat, and guilty about it?” “I feel upbeat because the country seems to be a better place than it was a month ago,” Brooks explained, “I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events. But there’s so much to cheer one up.”

One of the things that got Brooks giddy was liberals’ newfound bellicosity. That same week, liberal hawk George Packer wrote:

What I dread now is a return to the normality we’re all supposed to seek: instead of public memorials, private consumption; instead of lines to give blood, restaurant lines… ”The only thing needed,” William James wrote in ”The Moral Equivalent of War,” ”is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.” I’ve lived through this state, and I like it.

There’s something perverse, if not obscene, in “dreading” the idea that Americans might someday get back to enjoying their own lives. “Private consumption!” “Restaurant lines!” The horror! The horror!

Like Brooks’s National Greatness Conservatives, a good many progressives thought 9/11’s national crisis brought with it the opportunity for a new politics of meaning, a chance to redirect American life in accordance with “the common good.” Both camps seemed to think American life was purposeless without a warrior president who could bring us together to fulfill our national destiny.

That’s why prominent figures on the Right and the Left condemned George W. Bush’s post-9/11 advice to “Enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” As Jeremy Lott notes, “in his laugh riot of a presidential bid,” Joe Biden repeatedly condemned Bush for telling people to “fly and go to the mall!” A little over a year ago, asked to identify “the greatest moral failure of America” John McCain referenced Bush’s comments when he answered that it was our failure sufficiently to devote ourselves “to causes greater than our self interest.”

True, Bush’s term “destination spots” is a little redundant; but otherwise, for once, he said exactly the right thing. And of all the many things to condemn in his post-9/11 leadership, it’s beyond bizarre to lament Bush’s failure to demand more sacrifices from Americans at home: taxes, national service, perhaps scrap-metal drives and War on Terror bond rallies?

National unity has a dark side. What unity we enjoyed after 9/11 gave rise to unhealthy levels of trust in government, which in turn enabled a radical expansion of executive power and facilitated our entry into a disastrous, unnecessary war.

In his Inaugural Address, Barack Obama condemned those “who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.” “Their memories are short,” he said, “for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.”

Can you recall the scale of our recent ambitions? The United States would invade Iraq, refashion it as a democracy and forever transform the Middle East. Remember when President Bush committed the United States to “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”? That is ambitious scale.

Not only have some of us forgotten “what this country has already done … when imagination is joined to a common purpose,” it’s as if some of us are trying to erase the memory of our complicity in the last eight years — to forget that in the face of a crisis we did transcend our stale differences and cut the president a blank check that paid for disaster. How can we not question the scale of our leaders’ ambitions? How short would our memories have to be?

Oddly, even Glenn Beck seems to agree, after a fashion. The 9/12 Project credo celebrates the fact that ”the day after America was attacked, we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States, or political parties.” And yet Beck has called on “9/12’ers” to participate in tomorrow’s anti-Obama “tea party” in D.C.

On the anniversary of 9/11, what’s clear is that, despite the cliche, September 11th didn’t “change everything.” In the wake of the attacks, various pundits proclaimed “the end of the age of irony” and the dawning of a new era of national unity in the service of government crusades at home and abroad. Eight years later, Americans go about their lives, waiting in restaurant lines, visiting our ”great destination spots,” enjoying themselves free from fear — with our patriotism undiminished for all that. And when we turn to politics, we’re still contentious, fractious, wonderfully irreverent toward politicians, and increasingly skeptical toward their grand plans. In other words, post-9/11 America looks a lot like pre-9/11 America. That’s something to be thankful for on the anniversary of a grim day.

Back in April there was a lot of debate about how many people actually attended the April 15 “tea parties” to oppose President Obama’s tax and spending programs. Pajamas Media, an enthusiastic backer of the protests, offered an estimate upwards of 400,000.

Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog, a more skeptical observer, diligently compiled what he considered “nonpartisan and credible” estimates – mostly from mainstream media or police sources – and came up with a detailed sum of about 311,000. Not bad for widely dispersed events, most with no big-name speakers or celebrities, not hyped by the major media (though certainly hyped by some of the conservative media).

But I’ve recently stumbled across reports of two tea parties that didn’t make Silver’s list. In a long profile of a councilwoman who supported Obama in Greenwood, South Carolina, the Washington Post reports on her encountering 200 people at a tea party in Greenwood. And the latest compilation of newspaper clippings from the Mackinac Center includes an April 16 article from the Midland (Michigan) Daily News about a tea party there that attracted 500 people. So who knows how many other farflung events didn’t get included in Silver’s comprehensive list?

Andrew Samwick of Dartmouth complained that the tea parties – and maybe even libertarians – weren’t clearly focused on the problem of spending. As I said in a comment there, I think that’s an unfair charge:

Here’s how one major news outlet reported them:

Nationwide ‘tea party’ protests blast spending - CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/15/tea.parties/ )
ABCNews.com said “Anti-Tax ‘Tea Parties’ Protest President Obama’s Tax and Spending Policies.” USA Today wrote, “What started out as a handful of people blogging about their anger over federal spending — the bailouts, the $787 billion stimulus package and Obama’s budget — has grown into scores of so-called tea parties across the country.”

It’s hard to put specific cuts, especially COLAs and the like, on protest signs; but I think it’s fair to say that the tea-party crowds were complaining about excessive spending and “generational theft.”

I’ve read conflicting reports on how focused last week’s tea parties were on the anti-tax and spend message. It does appear there were confused folks who thought the protests were platforms for nationalism, war, and partisan anti-Obama rants. But I’m not buying the completely dismissive tone taken by some pundits who viewed the events as simply being pro-GOP rallies fueled by Fox News.

A boisterous crowd in Greenville, SC saw right through Republican Congressman Gresham Barrett’s transparent attempt to curry their favor heading into his 2010 campaign for governor of the Palmetto State:

Frankly, I can’t believe the guy made it through the five minute speech given the level of heckling and booing. Regardless of what one thinks of the crowd’s behavior, they deserve credit for knowing that Congressman Barrett voted for the TARP bailout and thus had no business faking solidarity with them, let alone speaking at the event.

Fox News and MSNBC are having fun with the taxpayer tea party protests today. Fox News is playing up the protests, while MSNBC hosts are making jokes about “tea-bagging,” while pretending that the protests were all orchestrated by Sean Hannity. I’ll be attending the protests in D.C. today, and I’m hoping that the message isn’t just anti-Obama because the Republicans are every bit as guilty as the Democrats for the government’s fiscal mess.

MSNBC hosts who think that the colonists didn’t mind taxes, but were just upset about the “without representation” part, should read Alvin Rabushka’s massive tax history leading up to 1776, Taxation in Colonial America.

Doing my taxes last night, I asked my twins (age 5 1/2): “If Mommy and Daddy had $100, how much should we give to the government?” One twin said “5” and the other said “10,” so they are off to good start on understanding limited government. Mommy reminded the kids that the government provides useful services such as fire and police, but the kids were comfortable with their answers.